Project Description

In the late 1980s, Boston relocated its elevated Orange Line into a nearby railroad corridor, transforming it into an intermodal connection. Local residents were wary of this transit relocation, fearful about gentrification the project might bring to their neighborhoods. Public art became a tool to help residents cope with the changes imminent in the Orange Line relocation. UrbanArts, a Boston-based public art organization, established a station-specific art program. Citizen-based station committees helped review artist proposals and also created opportunities for residents to document the transformation they experienced in their neighborhood through photography, oral history, and writing.

The Artists' Lens invited high school students to work with professional photographers to document changes, helping residents assert an identity they felt was being erased by the massive construction project and to relieve tensions that had been building in their community. Boston Contemporary Writers selected prose and poetry from a statewide competition that was then inscribed in granite and permanently installed in the new stations and adjacent parkland. An oral history project, Sources of Strength, offered students of Roxbury Community College and residents an opportunity to learn oral history techniques and to gather stories from community residents. The stories were developed into a theatrical performance presented in collaboration with two colleges; an exhibition of the text accompanied by photo portraits of the storytellers was also presented.

Civic Engagement/Dialogue Activities
Nearly eight hundred people of all ages and backgrounds took part in the projects. A ten-member site committee of community representatives served to develop a community profile for each station's art program. These profiles were used by the professional art selection panels to select artists to develop proposals. The photographic and oral history projects actively stimulated residents' awareness of the changes that had been introduced historically into Southwest Corridor communities and were continuing to be introduced by economic and political forces beyond residents' control.

Information Sources
Margulies Breitbart, Myrna and Pamela Worden. "Creating a Sense of Purpose: Public Art and Boston's Orange Line," Places. Brooklyn: Design History Foundation, v. 9, no. 2, summer 1994. Wendy Feuer, art in transit: making it happen.U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Transit Administration.